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Shirt Without Stripes

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Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#621

Post by uniqueid »

wyattpeak wrote: post #615
uniqueid wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m uncomfortable with your use of “mere.” It might connote that what Google Search does now is an improvement.

And that's exactly what I mean to connote, text matches make for appalling search. I have the same reservations about Google as anyone, but rewriting history is never the right move. Moving beyond text matching was what made search truly useful.

    > Moving beyond text matching was 
    > what made search truly useful.
PageRank is what made Google more useful than its competition. They had it since the beginning, and I like it.

What I don't like is to search for the band "Chrisma" and get results for "fruitcake sale!" because Google corrected my spelling to "Christmas", decided to look for related concepts, and then boost whichever result is the most mercantile.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#622

Post by m_sch »

tgv wrote: post #371
krick wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pointless overcomplicating. I might agree if the example would be slightly more interesting, but "without stripes" isn't even "absence of ", it is essentially a colour/pattern and can be easily attributed to a range of things exactly the same way "green" can be. Google translate correctly associates much more dubious and abstract concepts than that, and does it with statistical methods, i.e. associating word…

Google translate doesn't understand what it translates either. It just relies on a very large corpus of parallel texts.

can you formalize/quantify "understand" please

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#623

Post by FridgeSeal »

Thorentis wrote: post #499
Alex3917 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least this is relatively innocuous. Until recently if you did a Google Image Search for "person" or "people", it only showed white men.

You've raised an entirely unrelated problem. Showing shirts with stripes when you search for "shirts without stripes" is just plain wrong. Showing only a single demographic of person when you search for "person" is correct, it just doesn't have the level of diversity you seem to want. Nothing about diversity is implied in the query, and so your observation is completely unrelated to a plainly incorrect query.

On the other hand, the bias in the results means they're somewhat incorrect: there is more than one demographic of person, showing only one in response to a query that doesn't ask for a particular one is incorrect.

If you were unfamiliar with them and searched "widgets" to find out more and got widgets of a single colour and form, it would not be an unreasonable assumption that widgets are mostly (if not entirely) that shape and colour, especially if there was nothing to indicate that this was a subset of potential widgets.

It's not so much "demand for diversity" as it is "more accurate and correct representation".

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#624

Post by mav3rick »

nikanj wrote: post #305
seiferteric wrote: post #137

I have noticed in the past few years google results have become noticeable worse for similar reasons. Google used to _surprise_ me with how good it was able to understand what I was really looking for even when I put in vague terms. I remember being shocked on several occasions when putting in half remembered sentences, lyrics, expressions from something I had heard years ago and it being the first! result. I almost…

Your search for "skiing Norway" mostly returns results for skiing in the French Alps, because those pages have much higher visit rates. Google is a dumbass nowadays, and regularly ignores half your search terms to present you with absolutely irrelevant results, that have gotten lots of visits in the past.

The results are correct for me. You just wanted to write a snarky comment. Did that make you feel better and gloat on Twitter about how you called Google a dumbass ?

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#625

Post by wyattpeak »

uniqueid wrote: post #621
wyattpeak wrote: post #615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly what I mean to connote, text matches make for appalling search. I have the same reservations about Google as anyone, but rewriting history is never the right move. Moving beyond text matching was what made search truly useful.

> Moving beyond text matching was > what made search truly useful. PageRank is what made Google more useful than its competition. They had it since the beginning, and I like it. What I don't like is to search for the band "Chrisma" and get results for "fruitcake sale!" because Google corrected my spelling to "Christmas", decided to look for related concepts, and then boost whichever result is the most mercantile.

> They had it since the beginning

Yes, they have. Read what I said again, I don't dispute this. What Google does now is an improvement over text matchers. I never claimed that what they do now is better than Google circa 2000 (though I don't care to register an opinion either way on that).

Whatever they've done since, their product remains better than text matchers. Mercantile search is better than terrible search.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#626

Post by 32gbsd »

albertzeyer wrote: post #437
alberth wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The # 1 google result for “Shirt without stripes” is this very own HN post https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Shirt+without+Stripes%22&

I guess, even in the original results, the problem is not really that Google search was not understanding the meaning of the search term (which is possible with today's models). Rather, it was a bit confused about what you are really searching for here. Maybe a comparison of shirts with and without stripes? The search query was just unusual, and it is not too unreasonable to guess that the query was not meant literal…

observations; firstly one can assume that google search can do no wrong. second observation is google search is made for noobs. thirdly you broke it because you are not a noob. 4th this will not be fixed because of said non-noob status.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#627

Post by tomhoward »

belorn wrote: post #550
searchableguy wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you google all of them?

Yes. I thought about words people use in priming studies, usually in order to trigger a behavior, and just typed the word with space and "person" appended. I did use images.google.se in order to tell google which country I wanted my bias from since that is the culture and demographics I am most familiar with. I also only looked at photos of a person and ignored emojis. I have also seen here on HN links to websites th…

You really should link to screenshots of your results so people can judge for themselves.

I just submitted all your searches to google.com from Australia, and the results were nothing like what you described; all the results were very diverse.

This is to be expected, as Google has been criticised for years for reinforcing stereotypes in image search results, and has gone to great effort to adjust the algorithms to reduce this effect.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#628

Post by 6510 »

jefftk wrote: post #512
6510 wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would predict that a query that has no advertising income will return no results, which is clearly not the case. I was about to say there are no such queries but then I remembered having to type a captcha for seemingly automated queries. The captcha page has no results on it obviously. This is because automated queries do not produce advertising revenue. You have to buy them. I've typed an insane number of que…

> I was about to say there are no such queries There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the firs…

> There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads.

Queries without ads do produce revenue. They are an essential part of the formula.

Think of people standing around in bars. We cant argue that just standing there doesn't produce revenue.

The flowers on the table in a restaurant produce revenue.

Free parking produces revenue.

If queries without adds didn't produce revenue they wouldn't exist. More often enough it doesn't even take an extra query, the adds will sit behind the links.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#629

Post by tgv »

m_sch wrote: post #622
tgv wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google translate doesn't understand what it translates either. It just relies on a very large corpus of parallel texts.

can you formalize/quantify "understand" please

Something like: build an representation of the text that's language independent and integrated in other knowledge domains, and predict the receiver's reaction to a verbalization of a representation.

But it isn't necessary to formalize any of it. At the current level of sophistication, our informal common ground of words like "understanding" suffice for a discussion. It's obvious Google Translate doesn't resemble human language processing.

Re: Shirt Without Stripes

#630

Post by jefftk »

6510 wrote: post #628
jefftk wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was about to say there are no such queries There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Trying some searches off the top of my head that I expected wouldn't have ads, I don't get any ads on [cabbage], [who is the president], [3+5], or [why is the sky blue]. On the other hand, if I search for a highly commercial query like [mesothelioma] the firs…

> There are very clearly many queries with no advertising revenue, because there are many queries that show no ads. Queries without ads do produce revenue. They are an essential part of the formula. Think of people standing around in bars. We cant argue that just standing there doesn't produce revenue. The flowers on the table in a restaurant produce revenue. Free parking produces revenue. If queries without adds did…

I don't think we disagree? Above I wrote: "Having a search engine that people go to whenever they want to search for things is incredibly valuable, because they will come to you when they want to buy things and you can sell ads."
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